Work Text:
A few things happen all at once.
Emmett is up to bat and Randy is standing just inside the dugout, hanging on the fence, watching them bat. The nut had turned a rotation in the sky and Jaylen’s Feedback fritzed out and faded away, leaving the sky stained dark with the eclipse. Night had fully fallen now, and the stars were bright, cold pinpricks against the inky tapestry. On the mound, the revenant was getting more nervous.
It starts with his foot hitting the ground; just a touch to keep his balance, but it reverberates weirdly in his ankle, then up his leg, into his ribs and chest. He can feel the Unstable, buzzing around like a disturbed hive of stinging insects, gathering itself up.
Emmett Internet, strike looking. 0-2.
The umpire behind Emmett is preoccupied calling the strikes; its voice has the level, almost measured monotone of any umpire on any day since the Book was opened—it isn’t rogue, but nevertheless Randy can feel the swell of precognition—someone is looking at him. The third base ump, there, to his left.
He starts to turn his head. Then:
“ LANDRY! ”
It’s Dominic’s voice, frantic, panicked. For a moment it brings Randy back to when he was small, in that brief period of time when Dom still held onto the hope that their dad would come home, when they still lived in the old apartment, the one that Randy can’t remember the layout of but gets the occasional flashbulb memory of things like this—when he climbed up on the railing of the balcony and looked out over the city. Dominic had spotted him and yelled his name just like that, voice full of protective terror.
It’s not his name, though. It’s the fire eater’s name. It’s Landry’s.
On the mound, Jaylen winds up.
It’s been a while, but when Landry was alive, Randy remembers in Tigerbeams series the spirit’s hot-blooded enthusiasm. He literally ran hot, hot enough to feel nigh-burned during handshakes, even through the skin of his host. Randy didn’t think about him much until he’d been dead for a season and a bit more, when his name haunted the leaderboard of a place no one had ever seen but in their visions, but he remembered this.
Landry doesn’t run hot anymore—it’s been soaked and crushed out of him by the depths of the Trench and a decade of sleep—so Randy doesn’t feel it when he takes a couple quick footsteps and then leaps forward, a full-body motion, and—
The vortex of fire that comes from the ump is just as blistering as Randy remembers, but this time, he can almost see the jittery violet instability as it peels away from his chest, reaching like hands to meet the curling flame, searching the field for another target, for the debted one for whom it pays, her eyelashes fluttering as she starts to glance over, even mid throw. Whether it’s precognition telling him all this, or the dissociation of instability bringing it to bear, every instant is heartbeats, every heartbeat is hours.
Landry skids into place in front of him and explodes into light. Precog tells him, look away.
He does not.
The true form of Violence is incandescent. It transcends thought and description, and Randy could never put words to what he sees, but he can’t stop watching as Violence consumes the flame, every bit of it, and the instability retreats, cowed, into his body, sheltering behind his ribcage. Dimly, the thought comes to him: how did that ever fit in a stupid jean jacket? And he wants to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Emmett Internet strikes out looking.
Emmett comes running, throwing their bat in the vague direction of the dugout where Workman picks it up and brings it back inside. They don’t notice, running to Randy’s side with a pixelated face of worry. Dominic’s behind Randy; he can feel his anxious footsteps in the tired ground, but he can’t look away from Landry as the spirit refits himself into a smaller form. He looks silly, his Hall Stars uniform in bright, Squiddish blue trite and underwhelming over the jagged and Magmatic shape of him. When he turns, his face is split apart with teeth and mouths and protrusions dripping with plasma. An instant later, it’s normal.
“Are you alright?” Dominic is saying. Randy’s eyes are fixed on Landry’s.
“Yeah,” he says, watching the spirit come closer. Every step flakes away some of the evidence of his true self; with every step, Violence recedes a little further. “Nice save.”
“Don’t mention it,” Landry answers, and brushes past him.